Galileo Galilei
father of observational astronomy and father of modern science.
“Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe” said Galileo Galilei.
His wonderful observations and discoveries
- On 30 November 1609 - Galileo aimed his telescope at the Moon. was the first to deduce the cause of the uneven waning as light occlusion from lunar mountains and craters.
- On 7 January 1610 - Galileo observed with his telescope what he described at the time as "three fixed stars, totally invisible, later they will be Jupiter's moons
- From September 1610 - Galileo observed that Venus exhibits a full set of phases similar to that of the Moon.
- 1612 / 1613 - Galileo made naked-eye and telescopic studies of sunspots. Their existence raised another difficulty with the unchanging perfection of the heavens as posited in orthodox Aristotelian celestial physics.
- 1617 - Galileo observed the Milky Way, previously believed to be nebulous, and found it to be a multitude of stars packed so densely that they appeared from Earth to be clouds.